Should I Force-Fetch My Pointer?

I was recently talking to a bird-hunting buddy of mine whose pointer pup is currently with a pro trainer, and one of the interesting things he mentioned was that she was going through force-fetch. Now the issue of force-fetch is probably one of the most debated and least-understood facets of gundog training.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, force-fetch (or force-breaking or trained retrieve) is, in short, a process by which your dog is taught to fetch on command, fetching as a learned behavior and a trained response to a command rather than natural instinct. That’s a vastly oversimplified explanation for an inherently complicated subject and process, and to many it sounds counter-intuitive, unnecessary and even cruel to force a dog to retrieve on command when (at least for retrievers) they already do it naturally.